## group_name order day
## 1 VAR 1 12/3
## 2 Property Rights and Wrongs 2 12/3
## 3 Cool_Group 3 12/3
## 4 Pink Gorrilaz 4 12/3
## 5 CCT 5 12/3
## 6 Carbon Tax 6 12/3
## 7 We Love James 7 12/3
## 8 The Windmills 8 12/3
## 9 Vroom Vroom 9 12/6
## 10 Judges for Endangered Species 10 12/6
## 11 Protectors 11 12/6
## 12 Student Coalition for the Green New Deal 12 12/6
Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over. -Mark Twain
When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water. -Benjamin Franklin
So far in this class we have talked about:
Environmental Externality
Pollution control
Property Rights Regimes
Exclusivity, Rivalry, and Transferability
Scarcity
What measures economic scarcity
What happens when market cannot deliver the signal of scarcity
In this module we will talk about:
What are we talking about when we talk about water?
Water quantity
Who is using the water?
Who owns the water?
How to allocate water?
Water quality
Sanitation
Pollution
Only a tiny fraction of the earth’s water can be used
0.3% of the water feeds 7 billion people
750 million people lacks clean water
Drinking dirty water leads to a series of diseases, or even death
A drop of water is worth more than a sack of gold to a thirsty man
When we “conserve” water, what are we really conserving?
Or, what is the harm of “wasting” water?
Two fundamentally different challenges
Water quantity problem
Not enough water to suffice human need
Cape Cod, California, Dubai, Israel
A resource problem: property rights
Water quality problem
Water is not clean enough to drink/use/recreate
Charles River, Potomac, Yangtze, Ganges
An environmental problem: externality
From your perspective, at what point (if any) does this discussion about water rights break down or become irrelevant for the Western US?
How do dramatic technical innovations fit into the economic assessment? What is the probability of the implementation of approaches that are currently considered ‘wild’ (for example, piping water from Canada and/or Alaska, large scale desalination factories and piping from the west, etc). At what point (if ever) do these become feasible?
At the moment, there are clear winners and losers in the water rights systems of the western states. What would happen to the system if a technological solution were found (and implemented) that removed the concern about water supply in the region?
Water as a resource
Surface water is a renewable resource consisting of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.
Groundwater is water that collects underground in aquifers.
Some aquifers are non-recharging and are thus nonrenewable resources
Others could potentially be recharged if hydraulically connected with a surface water system
Many places in the world is facing water challenges
4 Billion people is under stress at least seasonally